I know I’m in the right place when I play Boz Scaggs on the (non-internet!) juke and the other customers don’t sigh at me and roll their eyeballs.
“Oooh, Boz Scaggs!” said an older woman a couple of stools down from where my wife and I were sitting at the Island Lighthouse Bar & Grill in South Padre during a recent weekend getaway. “I haven’t heard this one in a lonnnnng time!” Now, non-Spring-Breaking Padre is not one of your Texas metropolises. It’s a little – how do I put this politely? – slow. (Yes, Dallasites, even slower than Fort Worth.) Which stands to reason, I guess. It’s a beach town, and most if not all such places attract and keep the kind of people who either detest or simply can’t handle the hustle and bustle of city living. The town, and feel free to correct me if I’m mistaken, also is sort of trapped in time, specifically the late 1970s, early ’80s – Scaggs’ Silk Degrees, the album on which my song selection, “Jojo,” appears, came out in ’76. There are only a few places here, far as I know, whose non-internet jukes go as far back or as deep into the radio-pop canon. All of them, all of the places, are regular haunts of mine, yes.
And Padre is preserved in a sort of implied, faux-wood-paneled, shag-carpeted amber – a priceless fossil if you, like me, grew up in that time period and love/hate it. A lot of locals down there sport Jamz-ish shorts and have that parrot-laden-Op-Panama-Jack-kinda look about ’em, and the plainspoken simplicity is damn near sweeter and more unassuming than Grandmama – the marquee at the Holiday Inn across the street from where we stayed read, “Potato Bar is Back.” How freaking sweet – in more ways than one – is that?
I’m glad there are some similarly quaint haunts here. J&J’s Hideaway, which, surely to everyone’s great dismay, will be R’ing I.P. soon, has an incomparable disco-ski-lodge-kinda thing going on, and a few outta-the-way joints, including A Great Notion, the Poop Deck Lounge, and Feathers at the Green Oaks Hotel, also would make some interior decorators cringe (not that we care, but still). As I’ve probably mentioned before, there’s an awesome Fort Worth Fire pennant hanging over the bar at the Notion that’s covered in dust that’s probably older than some of your children.
We can’t let ’em die or at least go peacefully into that night (the good ol’ bars, of course – not your kids!). The other day at Fred’s Texas Café, a Fort Worth institution off West 7th Street now caught in the eye of a development dust-storm, a buddy of mine was already lamenting what hasn’t even happened yet: gentrification, yuppie-fication, whatever you wanna call it. Theoretically, I don’t mind Progress as much he seems to – if it weren’t for Progress 25, 30 years ago, most of us wouldn’t have anything to get so darn nostalgic about.
But there’s Progress and then there’s faux Progress, and I do agree with him that Fort Worth sheds a little piece of its soul every time another “JJ’s” goes under. There always will be a time and place here for whatever mood you’re in: swanky, rocking, whatever. Hopefully, for me, there will always be a time and place here for “Jojo.” With no sarcastic sighs and rolling eyeballs anywhere near.
Contact Last Call at lastcall@fwweekly.com.
